Before air and spaceflight, we had to make our maps from the ground, while literally
exploring the areas on foot or on a boat, with no way of truly knowing if we actually
got it right.
So it’s pretty much inevitable that cartographers would have screwed up here and there along
the way, some of these mistakes even made their way into legend, like Atlantis, El Dorado,
and Lemuria.
These mistakes range from islands that aren‘t actually there to getting the shapes of continents
wrong to entire continents that never actually existed.
So what were some of the biggest blunders we made on our way to understanding the shape
of the Earth?
The Sea in the Middle of Australia Australia is a massive island dominated by
numerous different features, from the lush eastern portions where everyone lives, to
the vast expanse of desert and shrublands popularly known as the Outback, to the great
inland sea in the north.
Except that last one… doesn’t actually exist.
So why did people think it did?
Well, while Australia was colonized by the British not long after their discovery of
said liveable eastern portions, information about Australia’s geography for most of
the 19th century was generally limited to the coasts.
Going inland from the newly settled colonies in modern-day New South Wales and Queensland,
European explorers discovered rivers like the Castlereagh, Macquarie and Bogan, and
noticed that despite their proximity to the Pacific coast, they all went westward away
from the coast.
Extrapolating on this knowledge (or lack thereof), former East India Company officer Thomas J.
Maslen drew up a map depicting a great river sprouting from a lake the size of a small
sea, flowing westward to the Indian Ocean.
The thinking at least makes sense, after all Europe has the Danube, Africa has the Nile,
Asia has several examples, North America has the Mississippi, and South America has the
Amazon, so why wouldn’t Australia have a great river of its own?
Well, while Australia certainly has no shortage of rivers, the rivers Maslen observed actually
flow into the Murray River as part of the Murray-Darling Basin, which empty out into
the Southern Ocean in the South Australian town of Goolwa near Adelaide, but alas not
forming a large lake to make the Outback habitable along the way.
Expeditions into the interior of the island continent also showed that where there was
supposedly a lake and fertile farmland, all there was was desert and shrublands.
And (Lake) Disappointment.
In a sense it was mostly just wishful thinking, with Maslen’s book not even selling 250
copies.
One explorer who was likely convinced of the idea was Charles Sturt, who embarked on an
expedition to find this sea in 1844, but all he found was what is now known as the Simpson
Desert, with not a lake to be found.
It is unlikely that even Maslen himself believed the idea for long, and it probably also didn’t
help how he had never actually visited Australia himself.
The Island of California On the other side of the world, a staggering
14-hour flight time away from Australia, we reach the US state of California.
Exploration of California-- although this time by the Spanish-- started up around the
year 1530, with tentative missions sent under the command of Hernán Cortés (of imperial
destruction fame).
Around 20 years earlier a popular romance novel called “Las sergas de Esplandián”
(The Adventures of Esplandián), detailed a particular mythical island.
As the book describes it, “Know that to the right of the Indies there
is an island called California very close to the side of the Earthly Paradise; and its
inhabitants were black women, without a single man, for they lived in the manner of the Amazons.
Their island is the most formidable in the world, with its steep cliffs and stony shores.
Their weapons are all made of gold, as are the harnesses they use to tame their wild
beasts, because there is no other metal other than gold.”
God their tools must have absolutely sucked in that case.
Nonetheless, when Cortés and the explorers he sent to survey the area to the west of
Mexico-- Diego de Becerra and Fortun Ximenez-- found and explored the peninsula of Baja California,
it was this very accurate legend of an island called California they had in mind.
When they landed on the southern part of the modern Mexican state of Baja California Sur
(sur meaning south) in 1533, de Becerra and Ximenez believed they had found an island
surrounded by the sea on all sides, and so brought this information back with them to
Cortés in New Spain.
A follow-up expedition by Francisco de Ulloa however was launched shortly afterward, with
de Ulloa tracing the coast until finding the mouth of the Colorado River, concluding that
California was definitely not an island.
Realizing their easy mistake, Spanish cartographers quickly started publishing maps correctly
showing California as connected to the rest of the Americas, but at the beginning of the
next century something weird started to happen…
In 1622 Antonio de la Ascensión wrote an account of Sebatián Vizcaíno’s 1602 voyage--
which he had been on board-- describing California as separated from the North American mainland
by “the Mediterranean Sea of California”.
The vessel carrying these dubious records however was hijacked by the Dutch and brought
back to Amsterdam, where Amsterdam-based bookseller Michiel Colijn started to publish maps depicting
California once again as an island, followed by many more over the coming decades, even
into the 18th century.
That is until, with mounting evidence from subsequent voyages to the region, King Ferdinand
VI of Spain made an official decree that California was not an island.
“So, like, shut up about it” he presumably said.
Also one fact I find kind of funny is how there’s the US state of California, then
to the south the Mexican state of Baja California (with baja meaning “low” or “lower”),
and below that Baja California Sur (or “low California south”).
Lemuria Because all good mini-lists consist of threes,
let’s finish off in the Indian Ocean, with a land conceived not by explorers but by scientists.
Philip Sclater was not a geographer or a geologist, and the world had already been pretty well
mapped by his time, but he was an incredibly accomplished and well-respected ornithologist
(bird scientist), having served as secretary of the Zoological Society of London for 42
years, having written over 1,000 papers and articles, and credited for numerous popular
theories in the world of biology.
He also had 7 different species named after him, does he sound impressive yet?
In 1864, Sclater noticed something a bit odd with fossils of lemurs and other similar primates,
particularly in their distribution.
In short he noticed that fossils had been found a-plenty in their native homeland of
Madagascar, but also far away in India, way too far for significant populations of small
primates to swim, especially with no such fossils on mainland Africa.
Now, had he been born maybe 50-100 years later his answer would have been simple: continental
drift.
The ancestors of lemurs likely first evolved in either the Paleocene or Eocene, around
50-60 million years ago, back when the world looked like this.
When the southern hemisphere supercontinent Gondwana broke up about 100 million years
earlier over the course of the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous, Madagascar actually
broke off from Africa nearly 80 million years before breaking off from India.
So that, and the fact that the Indian fossils weren’t actually lemurs they were just similar
primate species, is our explanation for all this according to modern science.
The problem for Sclater though was that the scientist who would come up with the idea
of continental drift-- Alfred Wegener-- was only -16 years old, and so quite understandably
hadn’t yet come up with this theory that would take decades to be taken seriously anyway.
Groups of animals can spread to other landmasses a short ways away through what are called
rafting events, but not this far.
Thus, Sclater posited the previous existence of a giant sunken landmass connecting India
and Madagascar, and as such he named it Lemuria.
Other scientists also made use of this idea, such as Ernst Haeckel, who used a similar
hypothesis to explain the origins of the human species, believing this to be the home of
the so-called “missing link” between humans and other primates.
Though the idea was initially accepted by many in the scientific community before the
theory of plate tectonics, where it really caught attention was in… less scientific
circles.
Russo-American co-founder of the Theosophical Society Madame Helen Blavatsky described Lemuria
as encompassing most of the Indian Ocean and being home to an ancient race known as the
Lemurians.
This landmass coincidentally matched with ancient texts from the Tamil people on the
southern tip of India of a sunken continent called Kumari Kandam, driving beliefs that
the Tamil people were closest to where the first humans came from, and which I’m sure
you can learn all about from the comments below.
Yeah this is a really fun place to end the video, that’s for sure.
By the way, much of the information for this video came from the book The Phantom Atlas,
written by the almost offensively-British-sounding Edward Brooke-Hitching.
I’d definitely recommend getting yourself a copy if you’re really interested in these
sort of mythical lands, even though they’re of course not the sponsor of this video…
actually that would be NordVPN.
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